Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Where
do I begin? I feel like giving you a development of my thoughts over the years,
lakini that would be too private, akin to sharing with you a page of my diary.
And I don’t think you want to read that. Nevertheless, elements of my personal
life will pop up here and there. And I will try my best to put some structure
into this because my brain is, currently, a chaotic place.

So,
I really don’t know exactly what I’m going to say but I’ll just ramble on and
hopefully we’ll get an interesting conversation going and figure out what to do
with this renewed, revived, ever-present hunger for Tanzania. I like using
‘hunger’, I recently adopted it and I can imagine you can relate to it. Like
me, you might be an individual who has grown up in Tanzania and lived or
studied abroad.

Anyway,
as I said, I don’t know what I’m going to say. In fact, I don’t know much about
anything concerning Tanzania. And the realization of this has been recurring
since high school. The realization has become stronger after coming to the US.
Mixed with feelings of homesickness, wonder, awe, shame, fear and
embarrassment, I have been thinking very hard about my particular experience
and how it has influenced my ‘Tanzanianness’.

If
I could sum up in one paragraph my current thoughts, feelings, hopes, and
aspirations for Tanzania, it would be as follows. First and foremost, I feel
there is a significantly large lack of education among middle and upper
classes. Yaani, watu ambao hatujawa na shida ya maisha kwa kiwango ambacho
maskini wanakuwa nacho, tunakuwa wapumbavu. I am speaking of myself here.
Because of my comfortable circumstances, I have become a product of societal
conditions that have rendered me to feel superior, all knowing, and, above all,
separate from, yet still belonging to, Tanzania’s society at large. I felt this
all through primary school, secondary school, and in high school.

One
of the moments that taught me otherwise was when I partook in an Intercultural
Dialogue Camp that a friend organized in Tanzania last year. It was like a
conference, a joining of various youths in Bagamoyo for a night. The main idea
was getting to talk about culture, the role that Tanzania’s youth play,
politics etc. For a while I had realized that the smartest people, the people
who knew most about society, government, and current affairs were poor
people.

Kila
mara Baba alikuwa ananiambia nisome magazeti lakini hata sikufanya lolote.
Kisa? Nilikuwa naona uvivu. Niliona ni bora nikae tu au niangalie sehemu ya Grey’s
Anatomy au Big Bang Theory. Na niliweza kufanya hivyo kwa sababu
nilikuwa na laptop na nilienda shule ambayo tulikuwa tunapeana filamu n.k. What
I am trying to say is that; I feel as though the better circumstances you have,
the more opportunities you have to mingle with money or other countries and
worlds, the less you care about what is happening in your own backyard. This
may certainly not be true for many. And I am not saying this is always the
case. In some cases, it makes you want to care MORE (after some maturity of
course).

About
three years ago I was keen to learn about how law works in Tanzania. So, I
asked my dad to accompany him to one of his court appearances. You cannot
imagine the utter shock I experienced when I walked in and heard everyone
speaking in English. Before we left, I literally had to pick up my bottom jaw
from the floor. Outside, I asked my dad, “kwa nini wanatumia Kiingereza?
Mtu akija ambaye anaongea tu Kiswahili inakuwaje?” He replied, “there
are translators” or something like that. I simply could not believe what I
was hearing. How exclusive it is to have English as the medium of communication
in court when a majority of the country is not proficient in it. Halafu
nikafikiria Bunge. Mbona saa nyingine huwa nasikia Kiingereza na saa nyingine
Kiswahili? Na tunapenda sana kuwacheka watu
waki“chemsha” kuongea Kiingereza. Tunacheka na tunatumiana hivyo
virecordings n.k. Just sad.

Karibu kwenye ulingo wa kutafakari kuhusu tunapotoka,tulipo,tuendako na namna ambavyo tutafika huko tuendako/Welcome to a platform for reflecting on where we are coming from, where we are, where we are going and how we will get there